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As a quick notice: The highlight selection plugin was not removed in KDE SC 4.10.0. Instead, a silly bug results in not loading the plugin. This is fixed for DKE 4.10.1. If you cannot wait, you can find a workaround here :-)

The project plugin in kate.git master has now the ability to call cppcheck. This is just hacked in at the moment and needs more love, but it works. Feel free to contribute integration of other code checkers, cppcheck is only the first, I hope ;)

According to our release schedule, KDE SC 4.10.0 will be available to the public in early February 2013. Following Kate in KDE 4.7, Kate in KDE 4.8 and Kate in KDE 4.9, this blog post highlights what’s new in Kate in KDE 4.10. New Features Kate Part got a unified notification system. It’s used in several places already, for instance for remote file loading, data recovery and Search & Replace information. Kate Part can now be configured to show a minimap of the document instead of a scrollbar. The minimap shows text in a miniature view and is useful for fast text navigation in the document. While the feature itself is stable, it may be changed and should be considered experimental. Feedback is welcome on our mailing list. Kate Part got several predefined color schemes. Feel free to contact us with improvements. Kate Part shows the current line while scrolling. Kate got an integrated Quick Open feature (ctrl+alt+o) for fast file navigation. News in the Plugins World Kate’s Pate plugin now provides several new plugins by default, with Python 3 support. Kate gained a new and very powerful Project plugin with ctags code completion. It is tightly integrated with the Search & Replace plugin as well as the GDB Plugin and the Quick Open feature. Kate Search & Replace plugin gained find-as-you-type support. Improvements Kate Part’s remove trailing spaces feature is improved. Kate Part’s scripting API gained several new features (e.g. zen coding script). The API now is more fine grained, e.g. you now need to “require(“cursor.js”);” in order to have the Cursor API. a lot of other little improvements, see our bug tracker for a full list. Bug Fixes Most of the following work was done during the yearly KDE conference and especially the joint Kate/KDevelop meeting this October in Vienna. A massive bug database cleanup was performed mainly by Christoph, so we closed several hundreds of bug reports, where ~280 are really fixed. So we are down to a total of 400 reports (only 70 of these 400 reports are bugs), where we initially had > 800 open issues. This also is reflected in the Kate bug charts: Read More

Being vaguely aware that Python3 had some “interesting” differences compared to Python2, I had decided to not think about Python3 for now, but then one of our dear users piped up to say that even building it was broken! That seemed weird, so I started poking around only to find myself falling Alice-like into a Wonderland where strings were not always strings… Well, I’ve long been interested in i18n and l10n in all their forms, especially as they apply to Indic languages, so I was somewhat aware of the sorts of issues that Unicode can throw up. Luckily, as a KDE developer I’m used to depending on QString handle all the routine grunt work so it was a bit of a rude awakening to discover that, the C API for Python strings takes many forms: Read More

ID files and TAGS files are generated by GNU idutils and etags respectively. They are often used in coding projects to facilitate looking up, for example, the name of a function, and then visiting where it is defined, etc. In large projects, ID files can be hundres of MB in size, and TAGS files several times that. That looking up is obviously nice to have integrated into your favourite editor… When I started on getting ID file support into Kate, my need was to efficiently navigate source code indexed using an ID file a bit over 100 MB in size. The bad news is that I now have ID files over 300 MB in size, but the good news is even that is not a problem! Not only that, but by combining the ID file with dynamic invocation of etags, I can have all the TAGS functionality I care about without needing to pre-generate a 600 MB TAGS file as well. Read More

The Kate/KDevelop sprint in Vienna was a really productive time. Thanks to Joseph Wenninger for organizing it and the KDE e.V. for the additional funding! The Kate team was able to really wade through a lot of bugs & wishes and fix/invalidate a lot of them. After some more days of work, this really is visible in our nice bug chart ;) Read More

With KDE 4.10, the naming of the color schemas in Kate Part changed. Instead of having “ – Normal” and “ – Printing” we now just have “Normal” and “Printing,” meaning that all applications using Kate Part now share these color schemas. In other words: If you change the Normal schema in KDevelop, you also will see these changes in Kile, Kate, or any other application that embeds Kate Part. If you just want to change the color schema for a single application, create a new color schema and then use this new schema as default! Read More

In KDE >= 4.10, Kate Part’s scripting changed a bit. The changes are already documented in the Kate handbook, but we’ll quickly have a look into it now anyway. Prior to KDE SC 4.10, scripts in Kate Part always had to contain the “type” in the scripting header, like indentation or command. This was changed to simply using different folders (system wide or in your $HOME kde folder) as follows: Read More

In KDE 4.10, Kate Part got a new MessageInterface. The idea of this interface is to have a standardized way of showing notifications in a non-intrusive way, similar to how KMessageWidget in kdelibs works. Using the MessageInterface is extremly easy, for instance to show a quick notification, you write KTextEditor::Message *message = new KTextEditor::Message(KTextEditor::Message::Positive, "Code successfully reformated."); document->postMessage(message); That’s basically it! The result looks like this (with a nice fade-in and fade-out animation): Read More

Loading huge files over the internet may take quite a long time. In KDE 4.10, Kate Part will show a passive message after 1 second that tells you the file is still being loaded, and, if wanted, the user can abort the loading process. It looks like this: This also fixes bug #128273. Again, cookies go to Christoph ;) Read More